Diana Coole, “Experiencing Discourse. Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment
of Power”
This article is published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9.3
(2007): 413-433

The purpose of the article is to consider the way power circulates within democratic
encounters at a corporeal level. It asks how approaching political life from the perspective of
the body allows us to see ways that exclusion or domination operate that usually remain
invisible to political science/theory.
This article is written as a critical materialist contribution to democratic theory. At a time
when such theory is obsessed with inclusion, it considers the role of an oft-neglected actor
within democratic processes: the body. The body itself is never excluded from deliberative
encounters or parliamentary debates, for it is only as embodied agents that interlocutors
assume their place and practise their discursive artistry in public arenas. But its presence is
for the most part ignored by those who study the interpersonal relationships that animate this
political domain. So paradoxically, the body is both its most visible and its most invisible
component. The question I pose is what difference it makes if the corporeality of participants
is taken into account. What is the potency that circulates among them on this visceral level?
Through and within what sort of somatic processes does power acquire efficacy and achieve
effects in democratic contexts?
The approach I develop to explore these issues is in principle applicable to bodies of all kinds.
However it is the analysis of how specific categories of body are positioned and expressed
within concrete situations that gives this kind of investigation its critical edge. While it is the
visceral and material aspects of embodiment I want to emphasise, it is clear that bodies which
enter the political arena never do so simply as biological organs. They are already mediated
by a range of social and institutional factors that affect their reception and which are in turn
reinforced or challenged by further processes intrinsic to the political situation itself. In order
to illustrate how such conventions (or opportunities) differentially mediate and are in turn
mediated by the flesh, it is therefore necessary to explore specific examples. In this article I
focus in particular on bodies that are sexed and gendered. This example both illustrates the
approach I am using and exemplifies one dimension along which a visceral form of power
reinforces structures of exclusion. Although this aspect of the discussion therefore has
especial relevance for feminism, I want to emphasise that this is only one – albeit very
important – index of the way power and bodies are sutured within democratic encounters. I
am neither claiming that the relevance of my approach is limited to female-feminine citizens,
nor suggesting that there is any intrinsic linkage between women and embodiment. This is
nevertheless a good example precisely because such a linkage has historically been prevalent
and its residual effects still retain vestiges of their former resonance.
The conception of power presumed in my discussion is indebted to a Foucauldian sense in
which power circulates through the capillaries of society in ways that are often anonymous
and invisible, through techniques or strategies that frequently seem too trivial or banal even to
be recognised as forms of power. My analysis of interacting bodies endorses Foucault’s claim
that the `question of “who exercises power?”’ cannot be resolved without an accompanying
problematisation: `”how does it happen?’ (Foucault 1988, 103; 1979, 26) Part of my argument
2
will accordingly be: it happens through corporeal interventions. Foucault himself alerts us to
the way power operates by constructing and constraining bodies, yet these bodies remain
essentially passive effects of power in his work. What my approach adds is a more
phenomenological sense in which bodies exhibit agency by exercising and experiencing their
own corporeal modes of power. What I try to do is to elicit this visceral network of power
relations and to describe the fleshy logic of its operation. As I will demonstrate, this is
especially important for understanding the dynamics of exclusion in democratic contexts.
Thinking the Body
When political scientists investigate power relations or political theorists study democratic
processes, they typically pay scant attention to the body. This `somatophobia’ can be traced
back to Platonic influences in Western culture but more specifically, it follows from the
Cartesian mind/body dualism that still underpins mainstream modern thinking (Grosz 1999;
Lloyd 1999; Lloyd 2002; Berdayes 2004). The ensuing neglect might just be attributed to
oversight: the very familiarity and constant presence of bodies means they tend to be taken for
granted, at least until they go wrong or unfamiliar bodies appear on the scene. One of the
tasks of critical thinking, however, is to unearth and interrogate such presuppositions and
occlusions. And what this reveals is that oversight is rarely innocent. In the case of the body,
its neglect typically reflects ontological presuppositions regarding its lack of agency (where
the public domain is equated with rational, effectively disembodied, actors); normative
prejudices regarding the undesirable and illegitimate nature of bodily interruptions in political
processes, and methodological assumptions that embodiment is irrelevant to explanations of
collective life. An aim of the analyses that follow is to show the ineluctable efficacy and
enduring vulnerability of bodies in political situations.
If mind/body dualism underlies the body’s omission from political analysis, then its
recognition as a powerful actor will require a different, non-dualist ontology. Such an account
has been developed by phenomenologists like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir and
Bourdieu. Because the analyses below draw on this account it is necessary to sketch in some
of its relevant aspects. Granting primacy to perception rather than to reason has some
fundamental consequences for this understanding of corporeality. To begin with, it allows a
distinction to be made between the objective body of which scientists speak and the
phenomenal, lived body. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, the latter remains contingent and in
process: `nothing requires that this body have this or that particular structure.’ (Beauvoir
1972, 19). It emerges in perception not merely as a passive receptor of sense data, but as an
open form that reaches out to and questions its environment. As such, it helps actively to
compose or stylise the world to which it responds. Drawing on Gestalt experiments, Merleau-
Ponty concludes that perception is already a primordial mode of expression. For the
intentional body the material world is alive with signs; it both elicits and helps to form
meanings that inhabit the sensible before intellectual judgement begins (Merleau-Ponty1962,
22, 35ff., 43; Gosz 1999, ch.4). This practically-motivated corpus continuously weaves new
meanings in the course of its existence, while its own forms and capacities materialise
contingently through its interactions with others and with its world. It has a lived familiarity
with its milieu that yields it pre-cognitive knowledge: `at the level of the human body’,
Merleau-Ponty writes, `I will describe a pre-knowing…, a silent knowing.’ Merleau-Ponty
1968, 178). If this is the genesis of consciousness, the latter’s corporeal provenance is never
entirely exhausted or outrun: as Bourdieu recognises, social encounters or linguistic
exchanges always remain saturated with carnal significance (Bourdieu 1990). The body3
subject that is irremediably situated in space and time also spatialises and temporalises: it is
dramatic and performative. It experiences its own organisation and capabilities as a general
body-schema, while expressing its singularity as a particular style of being-in-the-world. It
first recognises and responds to others on this existential level, too: their overall comportment
and demeanour appear to it as equivalent but divergent styles of the flesh.
It is a further peculiarity of this phenomenal body that unlike objects, it is inherently
reflexive: a folded, `two-dimensional being’ where there is `a body of the mind, and a mind of
the body and a chiasm between them.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 137). Merleau-Ponty derives
this account from Husserl’s description of the body’s reversibility: it touches and is touched;
it sees and is seen (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 93; 1968, 255). As such it is simultaneously a
passive object within a visual or tactile field (it has exteriority) and an active, agentic
sentience (it has interiority; its situatedness grants it a perspective on the world; it experiences
itself). As Beauvoir says, to `be present in the world implies strictly that there exists a body
which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view towards this world’
(Beauvoir 1972, 39). Yet these two dimensions are never entirely coincident: there is a `shift’
or `spread’ [bougé, écart] between them, which is where power as well as freedom slip in
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 136, 147f, 254, 272). Judith Butler points out that `there are moments
of contact’ here that know neither closure nor identity, while Claude Lefort notes that this
body `is not only sensible to itself’ but is also `outside itself, it is a stranger to itself.’ (Butler
2005, 196; Lefort 1990, 7).
My starting point, in a field where there is as yet no satisfactory theoretical approach ready to
hand, has been to develop aspects of this phenomenological ontology that seem especially
evocative for understanding the visceral dimension of democratic exchanges. In particular it
challenges the conventional sense in which agency is associated with rational subjectivity.
Instead it describes a plethora of processes and capacities that emerge contingently within an
intercorporeal and intersubjective field. The body already exercises some agentic capacities
here inasmuch as it is expressive, motivated, reflexive, efficacious, creative and
communicative (Archer 2000; Coole 2005). It thereby suggests a non-cognitive proliferation
of meaning and a corporeal mode of knowing, whereby bodies emit and decipher signs that
do not necessarily pass by way of consciousness. So there is a dense but lucid corporeal
syntax whereby recognition and communication already occur and which provides discourse
with an ineliminable subtext. Here there are ample opportunities for a specifically corporeal
mode of power to operate.
The phenomenal body is simultaneously passive and active. Thanks to its reversibility, it has
exteriority and interiority. This two-dimensionality is important because it describes a body
that is at the same time lived and efficacious, and constrained and vulnerable; one that is
accordingly both vehicle and victim of power. If it is used instrumentally as a rhetorical prop
or dramatic prosthesis to add colour to discursive performances, it also exerts power in its
own right and according to its own visceral talents and experiences. It extemporises and
plays; it is unruly or recalcitrant; it has a life of its own. It interprets, negotiates,
communicates; it wields and responds to myriad signs. Its acts become lodged in an
intersubjective field where they are learned and disseminated as memories and habits of the
flesh; sedimented and reproduced as the corporeal equivalent of ideology (Bourdieu’s
habitus). But the flesh also rebels and enacts its own mode of refusal or innovation.
4
Because the body situates actors and gives them an outside, however, its exteriority also
situates them within intersubjective fields and socio-corporeal hierarchies where they are
rendered passive and fragile. The flesh is vulnerable to material as well as symbolic violence
and pain. It is objectified, imprisoned and exploited. It is further subjected to the Look, the
gaze, the surveillance of the other (Sartre 1956, 347f; Merleau-Ponty 1969; Foucault 1979,
195; Asad, 2003; Butler 2004). Its surfaces are marked and inscribed by others, such that
different bodies are recognised and categorised, disciplined and excluded. Foucault writes that
the body `manifests the stigmata of past experience’; it is the `inscribed surface of events’,
`totally imprinted by history’ (Foucault 1977, 148). This is where genealogical detail can
enrich phenomenology. But it is the latter’s account of how interiority and exteriority circle
around one another that allows us to grasp how in situations of power the body remains an
ambiguous phenomenon, subjected to power but also corporeally agentic in exercising it;
experientially familiar to itself yet disciplined by meanings alien to it.
A final theoretical point concerns the way I use this ontology of the body to understand the
relationship between embodiment and power. Broadly speaking, I suggest that this requires an
approach that emulates or replicates the reversibility of the body itself. Paying attention to its
interiority and exteriority means focussing on its experiential as well as its structural aspects.
Now, despite criticising the dearth of attention to embodiment in mainstream political studies,
I am of course aware that there have also been more materialist approaches that do
acknowledge the importance of the senses to human identity, knowledge and action. From
Aristotle to Nietzsche, within Marxism and feminism, and in some recent examples of
sociology and poststructuralism, one can find fulsome acknowledgement of the body’s
importance.1 From the phenomenological and existential perspective I have been explicating,
however, the flaw of most such theories is that although they insist on the body’s significance,
they rarely explore how corporeality itself affects or is affected by concrete situations, or how
it is experienced viscerally by their protagonists. Instead they tend to comment on other texts
that discuss the body; objectify the body within a theoretical structure, or present embodiment
as a discursive construction – a legible text – that effaces its materiality (Shilling 2003;
Braidotti 2000, 42f).
Judith Butler (whose work is often associated with this last flaw) argues in an early article
that for `a concrete description of lived experience, it seems crucial to ask whose sexuality
and whose bodies are being described’ within particular social and cultural contexts (Butler
1989, 98). But in order to appreciate the role of the body in contexts of power, it is also
necessary to elicit first-person experience as well as third-person structures and observations.
This is why for example Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Sonia Kruks, Linda Martín Alcoff
and IrisYoung have all been interested in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and have
summoned it to feminism’s aid as a way of approaching women’s corporeal experience.2 With
the notable exception of Young, however, actual examples of this application remain rare.
Noting recently renewed interest in existential phenomenology, Young herself characterises
this as an approach that aims `to speak from the point of view of the constituted subject’s
experience, in ways that complement but do not duplicate the observational or interpretative
methods of Foucault, Butler, or Bourdieu.’ (Young 2005, 8). Rather than being merely
complementary, however, I have argued that the phenomenological description of the body
shows the importance of interweaving these methods if the chiasmic relationship between the
personal and the political, or experience and structures, is to be grasped. This dual approach
5
allows for an ongoing cross-checking as it moves towards a fuller picture of embodied
intersubjectivity.
This more dialectical investigation is also needed to counter concerns, not least among
feminists, that a return to experience sometimes provokes. Critics worry here lest attention to
experience be equated with disingenuous faith in the lived as a bedrock of pre-discursive truth
or in subjective accounts untouched by ideology (Olkowski 1999, 60-61). This is why it is
important to recognise that the body’s appearances are always mediated by culture and
society. But this mediation must be matched by an approach that recognises the irreducibility
of experience to an effect of power. In sum, an analysis of bodies within concrete political
situations must combine phenomenological attention to the sensuous and symbolic ways
actors experience their own bodies, with attention to the structures of power that circumscribe
this experience. The latter must in turn both pay attention to material or discursive structures
that categorise and stratify bodies on a macro level and undertake more detailed, genealogical
investigations of the way anonymous micro-powers help produce experiences and discipline
performances within particular contexts.
Bodies in Democratic Contexts
Because of its material needs, the body’s welfare is an issue for democratic debate and its
behaviour is a target of biopower. But it is those participatory occasions where embodied
actors interact that interest me here. Such encounters regularly and ritualistically occur within
the formal spaces of democratic institutions, notably in representative legislatures. They are
also presumed by those aspects of direct democracy that deliberative models inherit, since
these emphasise active communication within the public sphere. Issues of social justice and
equal representation suggest that diversely-bodied citizens must be included in both arenas.
Part of the appeal of discourse ethics is its insistence on processes where citizens do meet in a
variety of civic spaces to deliberate together, flaunting their differences rather than hiding
them behind a veil of ignorance or within the private realm. `A portion of the public sphere is
constituted’, Habermas explains, `in every conversation in which private persons come
together to form a public.’(Habermas 2000, 288). There is an emphasis here on social, faceto-
face encounters where a speech act is an action and there is material, bodily presence.
Notwithstanding Habermas’s emphasis on the normative qualities that define the
reasonableness and inclusiveness of such encounters, participation here entails performances
by embodied actors who are situated in time and space. This is the existential component that
accompanies the normative element in the term `ideal speech situation’. As such, senses,
spaces and gestures are ineliminable components of communication: whatever its rationalist
ideals, deliberation remains a lived experience and has a dramatic quality. As Nancy Fraser
observes, the public sphere `designates a theater’ where participation occurs in `an
institutionalised arena of discursive interaction’ (Fraser 1997, 70). Once embodied actors
enter such arenas their bodies get caught up in various tiers of power relation, but their
activities also become fertile ground for symbolic interactionists such as Erving Goffman,
who writes of his perspective that it `is that of the theatrical performance; the principles
derived are dramaturgical ones.’ (Goffman, 1969, 1). But as Fraser notes, public interaction
has always been governed by exclusionary `protocols of style and decorum’ that act as
`informal impediments to participatory parity’ (Fraser 1997, 78; Warner 1992). One might
expect her caveat to be even more valid for those formal institutional spaces where
parliamentary debate occurs.
6
In the studies that follow I begin with the most visceral levels of embodiment and examine
their mediation in and by political structures. I then move to a more specific analysis of social
interactions as these are modulated by actors’ sense of embodiment. Using examples to
illustrate observations here, in particular that of sexed and gendered flesh, reveals how
profoundly social experience is affected by broader structures of power that differentiate and
work upon entire categories of bodies. This conclusion leads in later sections to an
investigation of the way such structures themselves work through bodily processes and in this
context I make use of a phenomenological notion of corporeal style.
The Senses in Political Situations
Beginning with that most visceral level where the body’s physico-chemical imperatives
remain omnipresent, one might note the literal interiority of flesh whose organs, desires and
demands are experienced by actors as an ineluctable dimension of everyday life. This carnal
experience does not disappear within more formal political spaces; the question is only how
politically relevant it is and whether broader structures of power mediate it.
Attentiveness, temper and patience can all be affected by the body’s daily rhythms where
hunger, indigestion, constipation, fatigue, desire and so on may be distractions from the
rationality of argument and affect the temper of exchanges. There is already a degree of
natural differentiation in some of these processes and their biological intrusiveness is
intensified already by further differences such as aging or disability. The question is how
significant these differences are within political contexts and whether they are enhanced by
social arrangements that translate natural differences into political inequality. Marx explains
that `the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world’, thus
emphasising their contingency. Their formation depends on the production of objects that
enrich or impoverish sensuous responses (Marx 1964, 141). Foucault argues that even those
aspects of the body which seem most instinctual or determined by physiological laws are
`molded by a great many distinct regimes’ wherein the body is `broken down by the rhythms
of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral
laws; it constructs resistances (Foucault 1977, 153). But there are also more specific,
institutional elements that mediate these sensuous responses.
Young, for instance, comments on menstruation as `a personal bodily experience that causes
many women some discomfort and annoyance some of the time.’ (Young 2005, 98). But
accompanying symptoms like backache or abdominal cramps are surely exacerbated by long
debating sessions or by uncomfortable seating in parliamentary chambers. This is where a
more specific and critical analysis becomes possible. For example gendered rituals can readily
exaggerate the differential effects of bodily processes. Tight clothes, inadequate calorie
intakes encouraged by dieting regimes, poor sleep because of unequal distributions of
childcare; micro-penalties that culminate in embarrassment and exclusion for minor
infractions of gendered corporeal norms, can all overdetermine biological processes. Such
social mediation is further compounded by how well bodily needs are catered for in the
physical fabric of democratic fora, such as sufficient lavatories or crèches. Young points out
`the misfit between women and public spaces’ inasmuch as the latter fail to accommodate the
practical needs of those who are also normatively obliged to hide their bodily processes under
threat of `embarrassment and shame’ (Young 2005, 98, 113). The provision of different
facilities is also indicative symbolically of how welcoming public spaces are to diverse
7
bodies, yet change can be pursued only when victims are able to articulate the private
humiliations and inconveniences they experience in public life.
In the next stage of my analysis I emphasise the more obviously intersubjective and
communicative aspects of corporeality, beginning with the senses and their reversible status.
Some senses nevertheless seem more intersubjectively important than others. Thus taste is not
obviously significant within deliberative situations, although one might ponder the derivation
of normalising metaphors such as being in poor taste. It might also be pertinent to recall that
certain foods or beverages were traditionally forbidden to women or by some religions,
thereby excluding some from important rituals and spaces where discussion occurs (for
example post-prandial port and cigars but also, the legendary surfeit of bars in the British
Parliament with their aura of the gentleman’s club or the laddish pub). Sometimes, too, the
body enacts its own visceral responses to social situations: it vomits at the sight of massacres;
it salivates at the smell of food.
The olfactory dimensions of discourse are rather more effective and reversible since the body
smells and is smelled. It is alert, once it comes into proximity with other bodies, to their
odours, which it may experience as more or less attractive or repulsive. Perfume or aftershave,
sweat, milkiness, a menstrual tang or halitosis, surely affect our desire to be with
others as well as subliminal judgments about their nervousness or hygiene and a sense of
unwelcome intimacy, especially where pungent smells indicate a body alien to our own.
Inasmuch as these visceral responses creep into our awareness, too, they draw attention to our
own bodily smells, where for example the anxious debater might be distracted by fears of
perspiration, while experiences of unusual warmth or humidity might undermine composure.
In sum, such sensations can affect the spatial and communicative dynamics of interlocutors
who gather in confined public spaces.
Deliberation or debate seem purposefully non-tactile, yet they are often initiated by rituals of
touching and being touched where hugs, handshakes and kisses convey a plethora of
corporeal messages from welcome to superiority and where impressions of others are gleaned
from the way they perform these apparently mundane gestures. Additional clues are adduced
from the way speakers touch themselves: unthinking acts that are ripe with opportunities for
misunderstanding in multicultural contexts. Wringing hands, licking lips, folding arms,
stroking jowls, are all signs used to evaluate others’ performances and to embellish our own.
Protocols of sexual difference, overlade by pulses of desire, intimidation and harassment,
further commend touch as an especially potent vehicle of carnal power.
Because democratic participation privileges speech acts, the auditory dimension would seem
to enjoy special status. Accounts of deliberative interaction are not however interested in the
materiality of the voice and they therefore neglect the aural/oral reversibility involved. But in
this auditory interworld there is an eloquent paralanguage that is effective in conveying
meaning in excess of verbal messages and again used to judge others. Studies suggest that the
intonations, pauses, sighs that lend dialogue its rhythms comprise almost half the force of a
response. Since more than half is also accredited to body language, this leaves a remarkably
small effectiveness for what is actually said (Belsey 2002, 12). Tone or pitch may for example
suggest embarrassment or power, but they can also be used as subtle instruments of exclusion
or as criteria for disparaging those who habitually use, say, more dulcet tones or regional
dialects inasmuch as these are markers of gender or class. Furthermore speech acts can
8
literally affect the corporeal bearing of others. Drawing on Bourdieu, Butler points out in the
case of hate speech that `the speech act is a bodily act’ where `the bodily effects of speech
exceed the intentions of the speaker.’ (Butler 1997, 141). In some cases would-be participants
may simply be silenced, too, while in others silence can be used as a mute form of
provocation where it loudly signifies a refusal to engage or a sense of umbrage.
Finally, since communicative encounters take place in the flesh, speakers’ visible appearances
contribute significantly to what they say and to judgments regarding their right to say it and to
be taken seriously. Impressions of visible styles guide and circumscribe listeners’ receptivity
from the start. When we see others, we recognise the material performances that accompany
their speech acts. Sexual (or racial or generational) identity is an irreducible component of
this recognition, conveyed as much by gestures, performative styles and adornments of the
flesh as by more superficial and inert signs of difference (breasts, skin pigmentation or
wrinkling). This helps explain why dress-codes have emerged as such a significant issue in
the politics of multiculturalism. But speakers are also aware through their vision, of an
audience’s response. A smile or frown can signify encouragement or disapproval; boredom or
disparagement are discernible in facial expressions and in bodily postures that may undermine
their performance, especially for those unused to public visibility.
John Berger draws attention to this reversibility of sight: `Soon after we can see, we are aware
that we can be seen.’ When he insists that the `reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental
than that of spoken dialogue’ he alerts us to the complex politics of vision that accompanies
discourse (Berger 1972, 7-9). For the corollary of seeing others is that speakers are watched.
As they become – or are made – aware of falling under others’ gaze, they may be moved to
more dramatic performances but equally, to feelings of self-conscious, especially if they feel
themselves being objectified and judged. There are many subtle ways in which their being
observed is drawn to speakers’ attention and may be used to discomfort them, but sexual
gestures or remarks may be especially effective here.
While Foucault has drawn attention to the way we are all normalised by falling under the
surveillance of others (Foucault 1979), work in film studies has distinguished between an
active male gaze and woman as its passive recipient (Mulvey 1975). Berger argues in a
similar vein that woman represents a quintessential reflexivity because in her
disempowerment she has learned to `watch herself’. Such arguments were typical of 1970s
feminism and the dangers of generalising gendered positions or responses in too universal or
binary a fashion have since become more evident. For theoretical as well as sociological
reasons, it is no longer advisable to suggest that paying attention to the body is necessarily
associated with, or especially problematic for, women. Yet Berger’s observation does retain
some salience, since it is women who are often still rendered especially aware of their
corporeal presence in contexts where they are unwelcome, through strategies of power that
are used to disempower, embarrass and categorise them as what Nirmal Puwar calls `space
invaders’ (Puwar 2004). Although body-anxiety has become more generalised as advertising
and health regimes draw attention to the body as a way of defining the self (so one might note
an intensification of bodily presence and even a feminisation of the male body) (Shilling
2003), there remains an important difference between managing one’s appearance to enhance
one’s power (the appointment of style gurus who advise public figures on colour or dress
codes is surely symptomatic of a heightened awareness of visual efficacy) and being
9
subjected to the other’s scrutiny or objectification. Here again one glimpses the ambiguity of
embodiment as active and passive, agentic and vulnerable.
While relatively little attention has been paid to this dimension of corporeal communication
and power in political studies, management studies have been extremely interested in its role
within another formally-structured dialogical situation: that of the interview.3 Interviewers are
offered detailed advice here about decoding body language, since it is seen as less controlled
or therefore dissimulating, and thus as a more reliable guide to the interviewee’s real
capacities and intentions, than their speech. Yet at the same time interviewees are advised on
how best to orchestrate their gestures and expressions to give the unfeigned appearance of
competence and confidence. From a more political perspective, one might consider that
reflecting upon the communicative aspects of bodily styles and gestural regimes is a
necessary critical step for understanding their potency and for shifting power dynamics that
operate at this level. But such body-management also suggests a further rationalisation and
disciplining of the flesh, as well as more sophisticated ways to manipulate dialogical
outcomes.
Numerous websites are eloquent with platitudes about body management that are distilled
from professional literature (Sterrett 1978; Hall and Hall, 1987; Edwards 1995; B. Parkinson
2005). They expound on the firmness of the introductory handshake (where the cleanliness of
manicured, perspiration-free hands and the inflection of the palm are crucial ingredients); the
angle of the head (tilted to suggest attentiveness but not flirtatiousness); the precise amount of
eye-contact (a calm, steady, none-threatening gaze that regulates blinks and never looks
down); the upward turning of the mouth in a relaxed smile (but never a grin or gnawing of the
lips); the controlled voice (not too tentative or rapid in its rate of speech, well modulated and
pitched because soft, tremulous voices are indicative of insecurity); appropriate posture
(avoid slouching or shuffling; lean about ten degrees forward but never rock). Above all,
relaxation, confidence and body-awareness are deemed crucial ingredients for success.
The interviewer, on the other hand, is on the look out for signs of an inability to handle stress;
for duplicity, arrogance, boredom or dishonesty, and is guided through the syntax of their
corporeal signifiers. The detail of the advice is reminiscent of Foucault’s account of the
manufactured soldier’s body, its parts taken apart and recomposed through a new anatomy of
knowledge and discipline. Yet it ignores the extent to which bodies have been subjected to
`subtle coercion’ (Foucault 1979, 135f, 137) or self-discipline, just as it forgets that corporeal
signs are ambiguous because they are often culturally encoded (looking down may
unwittingly for example signify shyness in the English public schoolboy whereas for the
Japanese woman it might intentionally convey deference before a superior). Even so,
judgements at this level often rely on stereotypes and even if these convey inaccurate
messages, they are notoriously difficult to reverse or ignore.
The social effects of physical spaces and their design have also spawned a sub-field of
proxemics (Hall 1968; Low 2003). Its exponents note that spatial changes bring tone and
accent to communication, influencing conversation subconsciously and even counteracting
the spoken word. The general ambience of a space will be affected by the arrangement of
furniture, while linear or curved seating alignments will provoke different dynamics than
side-by-side or facing seating. This link between dialogue, space and architecture has been
taken into account during the design of new debating chambers, where for example
10
implications for inclusiveness have been related to the differences between a Westminster
style chamber (where opposing parties sit confronting each other) and regional assembly
buildings with more circular auditoria. The way bodies inhabit and respond to public spaces
in not merely passive, either, because these are existential as well as Euclidian spaces. Their
spatialising, mobile effusiveness suggests a lucidity with additional communicative and
power effects, as when powerful speakers take command of a public arena through expansive
gestures and booming voices until their bodies seem literally to swell or extend. Perhaps a
category of corporeal capital should be introduced here.
There are, in conclusion, many material ways in which speakers’ bodies express themselves
and are experienced by interlocutors, whether they speak or listen. Not all of these are
vehicles of power, even where they contribute a layer of corporeal significance to verbal
communication. But the foregoing account does suggest many ways in which power is
wielded, either instrumentally or unwittingly, by bodily acts whose effects exceed the
intentions of speakers and whose differential effectiveness is compounded by social
arrangements or normative assumptions. It is the way corporeal experience is mediated by
social structures that it both engenders and responds to, that I examine in the next section.
Here I will suggest ways in which actors’ complementary experiences of their own and of
others’ bodies can result in group exclusion that occurs through small and subtle yet
significant and discernible modes of power.
Embarrassed and Excluded
Earlier I mentioned that dramaturgical public arenas invite the kind of analyses exemplified
by Goffman. His work offers rich phenomenological insight into how embodied actors
experience and express uncomfortable social situations (Goffman 1956; Shilling 1999).
Although he does not focus specifically on political interaction, his work does suggest some
of the ways power and exclusion operate through a somatic medium. Goffman appreciates,
too, the reversibility of the body: his actors recognise corporeal signs of social distress in
themselves and among others. Although he does not directly explore ways in which this might
be used to gain power over others, his descriptions are ripe with such implications.
Embarrassment is described by Goffman as one pole of a continuum that includes unease and
discomfort. Its lived and visible aspects together comprise a `flustering syndrome’ and it is
easy to imagine this occurring during the sort of face-to-face encounters that democratic
participation often entails. In such situations interlocutors recognise embarrassment or
shyness in themselves and in others by `objective signs of emotional disturbance’. Goffman’s
studies reveal that such signs are manifest in voices, where an unusually high or low pitch,
breaking and quavering, stuttering and malapropisms, suggest uneasiness. Facial signs such as
tics, blinking and blushing, as well as disruptions of movement that becomes hesitant and
vacillating and of flesh that shakes and trembles, reinforce this exhibition of unease. But
Goffman, like Merleau-Ponty and Berger, also recognises the reflexivity of bodily experience
and he thus describes the lived counterparts of these visceral messages. An awareness of their
own strained or unnatural gestures, constricted diaphragm, tense muscles and a dry mouth
reinforces participants’ overall sense of discomfort, rendering them more vulnerable to
others’ disparagement (Goffman 1956, 264-267). Indeed victims of embarrassment may find
themselves unable to mobilise their physical and intellectual resources for the task at hand.
Incapable of responding to others in a way that allows smooth conversation to continue, they
are present but not `in play’. The fixed smile, nervous laugh or busy hands are further
11
corporeal responses used to disguise – and betray – an actor’s flustered state. If they fail, tears,
temper tantrums, fainting or panic might ensue (Goffman 1956, 266-267).
At this stage, Goffman tells us, the individual `answers to a new set of rhythms, characteristic
of deep emotional experience’. In chronic cases, dialogue may break down altogether; the
individual concerned might even flee. Discomfort, it follows, could then result in de facto
exclusion from deliberative processes, as well as in self-exclusion from potentially
embarrassing situations. So embarrassment is not just any experience, but a privileged one
inasmuch as it disrupts the very competences that dialogue requires. And once it emerges it
has a tendency to become self-reinforcing, since its signs are taken as evidence of
incompetence, inferiority or defeat: precisely the feelings already experienced by the
embarrassed.
Because this sort of phenomenological focus is sometimes criticised as too individualist or
subjectivist, it is important to stress that it is the social context that concerns Goffman:
flustering is a response `in clear-cut relation to the real or imagined presence of others.’
(Goffman 1956, 264) Embarrassment must therefore be understood as a generalised social,
rather than an individual psychological, phenomenon. But equally, if embodied agency is
performative and performed for others, it also has an interiority whereby social actors
experience their performances in ways that affect their virtuosity. This is what brings those
performances to life as more than the mere repetition or transgression of existing structures; it
is what allows reflection and change.
There is an overall presumption in Goffman’s analysis that most participants will be wellintentioned
individuals who try tactfully to avoid embarrassing others or if they fail, to
disguise awareness of others’ unease. There is therefore little explicit acknowledgment that
embarrassment might be used as an instrument of power to exclude those who are
unwelcome. Goffman suggests nonetheless that those who fall short of certain moral, mental
and physiognomic norms will find themselves trapped into making unsustainable identity
claims. The moment of crisis itself is determined, moreover, by the `affective standards’ of
the `little social system’ that is its context, whose interactive cohesion now disintegrates. A
dialectics of conformity and exclusion does therefore structure these encounters, where the
power that modulates them operates on a largely perceptual level: things `go well or badly
because of what is perceived about the social identities of those present.’ (Goffman 1956,
268).
Since vulnerability to flustering varies according to the different styles of bodies whose social
status is recognised through these idioms, it follows that embarrassment can be used – going
beyond Goffman now –as an effective means of disciplining or excluding entire categories of
embodied actors. Goffman is aware that a whole group may experience social discomfort
when its status marks it as a parvenu. Where embarrassed individuals are identified with a
particular sub-group, he notes too that its other members may share their embarrassment,
recognising it as a response to a difficult situation whose predominant tone is one of
discomfort (Goffman 1956, 265). Although Goffman might be criticised for paying
insufficient attention to the genealogy of the styles and standards in which this sort of drama
unfolds, he does notice that a classic condition for embarrassment is one where actors
experience a `sudden change in status’ and acquire a subjectivity `that other individuals will
not fully admit because of their lingering attachment to the old self.’ Furthermore, to `affect
12
the style of one’s occupational or social betters is to make claims that may well be discredited
by one’s lack of familiarity with the role.’ (Goffman 1956, 268, 269; Goffman 1977) Critics
have often identified such experiences as an enduring problem for newcomers who enter
traditional political spaces. What Goffman’s analysis adds is detail as to how this power
might work its exclusionary magic through small visceral acts and responses.
If Goffman’s work is helpful in grasping the socio-dynamics of somatic-affective power
relations then Iris Young’s emphasis on greeting, as a way of making democratic participants
feel welcome, is significant in describing a socio-corporeal activity whose inclusiveness has
the opposite effect to embarrassment. Greeting, Young explains, involves `situations of
political communication, in which participants explicitly acknowledge the other participants’,
and `they are more substantively inclusive that those that do not.’ Such acts of
acknowledgement may include tactile acts like hugs and handshakes, or catering for material
needs by providing sustenance. Greeting is described as an important `communicative
gesture’ within participatory practices since it helps establish trust, politeness and respect. Its
rituals help to keep discourse going (Young 2000, 57-8). But Young is also aware of what she
calls `internal exclusions of style and idiom’, where rhetorical skills and gestures supplement
the logic of argument to privilege particular groups, and corporeal communication plays a less
congenial role. What she calls cultural imperialism operates by marking excluded bodies as
deviant, other, and it enacts its exclusions `in mundane contexts of interaction – in the
gestures, speech, tone of voice, movement and reactions’ such as `a certain nervousness’,
distance or avoidance of eye contact (Young 1990, 123).
Styles of the Flesh
A concept that has appeared several times during my discussion of corporeality but on whose
significance I have not as yet commented, is that of style. This omission needs to be rectified
now because style is one of those rare concepts that seems capable of crossing the mind/body
divide (since it is irreducibly cultural and corporeal), while it is also a term invoked by
phenomenologists and constructivists alike. According to the former, we saw that it is in the
body’s perceptual ability to form or stylise its world that its agentic capacities first emerge.
Similarly, it is in its limited ability to improvise upon and develop its own style that the body
reveals its contingency and singularity as a work in progress. In these contexts style refers to a
relatively open, aesthetic unity of parts that has existential significance as a particular manner
of being-in-the-world. It is where the materiality of the flesh becomes meaningful.
It is through their styles that political actors recognise one another. As Merleau-Ponty notes,
when we converse with others we grasp their corporeal style and its existential significance
all at once, because `we recognize a certain common structure in each person’s voice, face,
gestures and bearing’, where another is `nothing more nor less to us than this structure or way
of being in the world.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 53). This is a level of communicative interaction
I emphasised in my account of democratic life above. `It is through my body that I understand
other people’, Merleau-Ponty argues, `just as it is through my body that I perceive “things”.’
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 186). Actors’ identities are not then conveyed only through the
medium of language, but `also through that of accent, intonation, gesture and facial
expression’, which together manifest the speaker’s `manner of being’ as a `variety of
existence’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 151). Such recognition, like style itself, thus goes beyond
the merely biological to identify a whole way of existing and of expressing one’s mode of coexisting,
where bodily habits and cultural identities are inseparable. Foucault uses the term
13
`ethos’ rather similarly to convey `a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and
behaving’ (Foucault 1997, 309).
But what the discussion of Goffman’s work showed is that style can also be used to identify
and categorise entire groups who evince a common idiom. I elicited from his study of
embarrassment the implication that such markers might be combined with subtle techniques
of power to exclude some groups, especially those whose styles are incongruent with existing
norms. Style is thus a descriptive term that can be put to normative and political uses. It is
also helpful in showing the body in its active and its passive dimensions. For like bodies,
groups may be capable of experimenting with or publicly revalorising their style as well as
finding themselves obliged – often unthinkingly – to replicating its monotonous rituals. What
the concept of style allows us to do, then, is ontologically to integrate matter and meaning and
methodologically, to recognise the personal and experiential, and the collective and structural,
as interwoven dimensions of co-existence. In the rest of the analysis I use this bridge to
examine a specific case in which a constituency’s style has been used to exclude and
undermine it through subtle mechanisms of power but also to show how the recognition of
stylistic differences contributes to their contestation.
Gendered Styles and Structures of Power
Since corporeal styles are forged and sediment within intersubjective lifeworlds it would be
surprising if a stratification as enduring as sexual difference had not resulted in differently
gendered styles, despite their contingency (Bourdieu 1990, ch’s 3, 4). This is what Beauvoir
describes when she notes how even simple observation reveals that `humanity is divided into
two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and
occupations are manifestly different.’ 4 Such difference may be less unambiguous today than
it was in post-war France but it remains a task for the social theorist to reconstruct its complex
genealogy, especially in light of Beauvoir’s insistence that woman is shaped not by nature
`but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the
action of others than herself.’ (Beauvoir 1972, 734). For styles have a tendency to inertia and
to reification; their sheer repetition often makes them seem natural. This is Butler’s claim
when she defines gender as `the repeated stylization of the body.’ (Butler 1990, 33) She
invokes Bourdieu’s bodily habitus (with its `strong echoes’ of Merleau-Ponty) to explain how
`norms become embodied’ through a `cultural style of gesture and bearing.’ It is precisely this
`bodily stylistics’ whose repetition yields the `tacit and corporeal operation of performativity’
(Butler 1997, 141, 152, 155). In this radically constructivist form, the body does not merely
express gender through its stylisation; the very repetition of stylistic markers produces the
illusion that it is naturally gendered.
Given my focus on democratic situations, what then of the institutional and lived dimensions
of this gendered stylistics? Is there evidence of its dynamics within formal political spaces?
Interviews conducted with women representatives in the House of Commons are instructive
here, as well as providing a means to hear women’s own voices. Many such studies have been
conducted and most conclude that real sexual equality will require more than women’s sheer
presence. (Footit 2002; Shaw 2002; Puwar 2004a; Lovenduski 2005). A change of political
style is also needed. Having interviewed the women MPs elected alongside New Labour in
1997, for example, Sarah Childs referred to a `feminised style of politics’ and it soon
becomes apparent that this is a salient issue for the women themselves. Their language
expresses a surprisingly polarised view of gender difference here, more reminiscent of
14
feminist theory circa 1975 than of its postmodern varieties, and it would be interesting to
speculate on the reasons for this. But one rather obvious explanation is that this is a fairly
accurate indication of the way sexual difference is negotiated in the British Parliament. These
women present themselves as speaking in the sort of `different voice’ identified by Carol
Gilligan (Gilligan 1982) and they share a perception of that voice as being collaborative and
consensual; of speaking calmly and honestly, as opposed to a more aggressive and
argumentative male style. Indeed feminists have often suggested both that the argumentative
aspects of rational deliberation are in some sense inimical to a more feminine style of
interaction and that the public sphere would benefit from practising something more akin to it
(Squires 1999; Young 2000). Childs notes that her interviewees present themselves as
employing a ` distinct’, `different’, `gendered’, `feminised’, style of language and politics.
Yet it is significant in light of Goffman’s study that these women also `considered that their
style of politics is judged as an inferior modus operandi.’ (Childs 2004, 14-15). This made
them feel vulnerable to disapproval or dismissal. Childs notes that almost two thirds of the
women she interviewed argued for the existence of gendered stylistic differences: as patterns
of behaviour whose feminine forms they distinguished from a theatrical, infantile, aggressive,
masculine style (Childs 2004, 3-5, 11). If such differences of style are based on participants’
perceptions, then it is at this experiential level that they acquire efficacy: as she remarks, it is
not a question of whether they are objectively true but of their effectiveness. In other words,
not only are differential styles and their corporeal signs vehicles of power, but such power
only becomes efficacious inasmuch as it circulates through lived experience. While it is true
that these women do not themselves comment on the corporeal dimensions of their particular
style, they are only too aware of the way this contributes to their perception by male
colleagues and they often mention ways it is used to intimidate them. Thus interviews
conducted by Nirmal Puwar yield remarks about a hooligan Tory element that makes remarks
about women’s clothes, hair and make-up. This MP judges them destructive, disgusting,
cruel, course, and notes how gestures and body language are also deployed to `put women off
their stride’ when they speak. Interestingly, some of these women explain such behaviour in
terms of men’s embarrassment, opining that `they actually are not comfortable with women’
and feel disoriented on encountering them in this formerly male space, where women’s own
body language remains unintelligible to them (Puwar 2004 86-7, 102-3; Puwar 2004a, 72-73;
Childs 2004, 6).
It is easy to infer, given their relatively recent access to legislative chambers, that women
might feel out of place, unwelcome and thus uncomfortable here in the ways described by
Goffman’s `flustering syndrome’. As Puwar writes, space invasion `is an encounter that
causes disruption, necessitates negotiation and invites complicity.’(Puwar 2004, 1). In these
more concrete situations, embarrassment that is engendered by corporeal means can readily
be wielded as a source of sexual power and exclusion, as her interviewees confirm. But
Puwar’s concept of space invasion is also helpful because it fills in some of the genealogy of
differential political styles I found missing from Goffman’s account, by relating them to the
spatial and structural histories of the public sphere (Puwar 2004, ch. 5). Space invaders are
those who trespass in public spaces where they are not (yet) at home. These are sites of
professional or gendered performances where female flesh has not been the somatic norm.
Puwar argues that pre-democratic, gendered scripts which embody masculine, warrior norms
of adversarial combat survive in the very architecture, as well as being replicated in the
15
gendered styles and practices, of the House. `The speech, voices, styles and decorum of the
bodies that utter parliamentary speech are heavily masculinised.’ They retain traces of
`gentrified heroic masculinity’ (Puwar 2004, 83; Goffman 1977). The folding of arms,
thrusting of chests, stamping of feet, waving of papers and roaring of derisory laughter are all
bodily expressions deployed in this theatre of aggression. She notes that they are indicative of
other masculinised debating chambers such as Oxbridge and public schools. Class and race,
as well as gender, therefore count here and it might be surmised that it is the habitus of only
privileged male actors that allows them to move between such spaces with ease. Indeed, it
would be interesting to see whether the rather reified sense of masculine styles described by
women MPs is similarly experienced as alien and exclusionary by gay or bisexual (or even by
`new’) men. Puwar concludes that `the routine ritualistic enactment of the script of an MP
simultaneously involves the repetition of gendered scripts’ which are synchronised and
dramatised by sedimented corporeal styles (Puwar 2004, 79). Like those of Childs, her own
interviews with women MPs show just how difficult it is for them to find an appropriate
performative style. Copying masculine styles is difficult; the results are often unconvincing if
not grotesque and embarrassing, and because the House is a conventionally gendered space
women are anyway encouraged to adopt the very styles of traditional femininity that are used
to demean them.
`The struggle exists’ Puwar concludes, `in trying to show that the required qualities can exist
in bodies that are not “classically” expected to embody the relevant competencies.’ (Puwar
2004, 91; Gatens 1996, 98). Her interviewees testify to the difficulties they confront here.
One says `you feel very sort of, very much like an outsider, because it is such a male
institution… built by men, shaped by men, in men’s image… you think you’re not part of it
and it’s quite difficult to get into your stride.’ Another reflects, `you learn the style, and the
norm is the male style.’ (Puwar 2004, 77) This is therefore a question of cultural change
rather than of critical mass. For as Puwar comments, there `is a great deal of labour involved
in “redoing” male and female scripts’, since women must manage and negotiate their
femininity in a situation where their bodies `signify all that which is excluded from the upper
echelons of the public sphere.’ (Puwar 2004, 93-94). One might recall Beauvoir’s lament on
behalf of the independent woman here: that she `appears most often as a “true woman”
disguised as a man’ and consequently `feels herself as ill at ease in her flesh as in her
masculine garb.’ (Beauvoir 1972, 734).
The irony, as Childs’ interviews show, is that the very characteristics of femininity that
denigrate women according to the combative style of the House, such as sharing and
cooperating, are much closer to the discourse ethics that deliberative democrats invoke (New
Labour male MPs – indeed Blair himself – have indeed expressed their own antipathy towards
the aggressive rowdiness of Prime Minister’s Question Time.) Many of the women
interviewed by Childs indicated an ambition is to transform the style of parliamentary debate,
so this is a democratic issue and not one confined to feminist politics. Perhaps the assumption
that embarrassment is an unwelcome phenomenon might even be reconsidered here, by
associating it with greater humility in presenting the self and as a source of empathy with
others in their struggle for acceptance. Puwar concurs that a `huge overhaul of the political
imagination’ will be needed. As the considerations above show, this must include attention to
corporeal and existential styles as important ways in which power is brokered. While
deliberative democrats would rightly insist on the undesirability of visceral power as a means
of exclusion, sociologists are equally correct inasmuch as they insist upon its probable
16
ineluctability. So if democratic institutions are to become more inclusive, change will need in
part to be navigated at the level of style and corporeality, as well as by enhancing formal
equality, representation and sensitivity to difference.
One conclusion that could be derived from Puwar’s account of space invasion is that over
time, alien bodies might acquire familiarity and become more readily accepted. Although she
contends that women’s presence per se is insufficient to bring change, it is encouraging that
MPs identified particularly obnoxious behaviour with an older Conservative cohort and that
masculine styles are themselves changing, not least because they must increasingly
accommodate diverse male actors whose class, ethnicity and sexual orientation diverge from
traditional norms. Puwar also notes in passing that her analysis of the spatial effects of
inclusion can accommodate any space: for example neighbourhood or occupational, as well as
institutional, arenas. From this perspective Habermas’s extension of democratic deliberations
to the more or less formal, public spaces of civil society also suggests that novel styles and
practices might initially emerge in less masculinised or polarised arenas than the House of
Commons, since these are forged under more open conditions. Perhaps it is here, then, that
new political styles are being experimented with and one might expect them over time to
influence more traditional political places. This does not mean that public spaces outside the
political apparatus are necessarily egalitarian approximations of an ideal speech situation, nor
does it follow that the visceral aspects of power that criss-cross communication disappear
there. But it does suggest that both research and transformative strategies can benefit from
paying attention to less formal democratic sites and experiences and to the variety of styles of
conduct that are being practised or invented there. Ultimately it is chimerical to expect the
body and its gestures or modulations to change in line with rational strategies, but in
propitious situations there is scope for corporeal improvisation and alterations of its idioms
and styles (Lovenduski 2005, 86-87). It is the task of the phenomenologist to investigate their
emergence and to assess their potential for democratic change.
Conclusion.
I have argued in this article that visceral experience is a crucial dimension of power relations
and I have provided many illustrations in support of this claim. This dimension is particularly
lively when individuals or groups have face to face encounters, since there are many ways in
which their bodies communicate messages to others and in which they are, in turn, used as a
means of excluding or welcoming them. Yet this level of power often remains invisible and
neglected despite its often insidious and potent effects, both for researchers and among
participants themselves. Because this is the case, I have argued that studies of democratic
processes especially – whether these are made for descriptive or normative purposes – need to
pay attention to the corporeal levels on which the communicative interactions practised in
democratic encounters occur. Once these have been presented, however, such
exemplifications almost inevitably lend a critical aspect to the analysis since they show how
corporeal messages are wielded to gain status and effectiveness as well as to exclude entire
groups from having an equal voice or an equivalent hearing. In exploring the way such power
relations operate in the case of sexual difference, I noted the importance of attending to lived
experience as well as to impersonal structures. I introduced the notion of style here, both as a
means of integrating these two levels of analysis and as a way of explaining how gendered
styles combine cultural and corporeal elements in their performances. Finally, I argued that
the contestation of democratic exclusion and inequality needs to pay attention to experiments
with new styles of political behaviour whose orientation involves a vital corporeal element.
17
18
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Tambornino, J. (2002) The Corporeal Turn: Passion, Necessity, Politics (Oxford: Rowman &
Littlefield).
Warner, M. (1992) `The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’ in C. Calhoun ed., Habermas and
the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).
Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press)
Young, I.M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Young, I.M. (2005) On Female Body Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
`Sending Signals Without Words’ at http://www.angelfire.com/co/bodylanguage/page6.html.
`The Body Language of Proxemics’ at http://members.aol.com/katydidit/bodylang.htm.
Notes
1 There are too many sources to include many of them here. But see for example
Moya Lloyd’s atypical inclusion of a chapter on `The Body’ in a recent text book on
social and political theory (Lloyd 1999). William Connolly reveals some important
links between neurology and politics (Connolly 2002) and the title of John
Tambornino’s The Corporeal Turn (2002) is indicative of recent interest in the body.
Sociologists, among them Chris Shilling (2003), have begun to integrate the body into
social theory. Feminists such as Rosalyn Diprose (1994) have developed various
aspects of this interest regarding women’s bodies. There have been many attempts at
applying Foucault’s sense of disciplinary power to the construction of women’s
bodies (see for example the essays edited by I. Diamond and L. Quinby in Feminism
and Foucault (1988)) as well as a renewed interest in emotions and passions (see for
example Moira Gatens (1996) and the volume essays edited by G. Lloyd (2002).).
Others have developed more Deleuzean elements, for example Braidotti (2000).
21
Further studies have applied similar approaches to bodies marked by race or class,
such as Alcoff (1999); Puwar (2004) and Charlesworth (2000). The latter have been
more inclined to use the sort of phenomenological perspective used here.
2 I examine these feminists’ indebtedness to and criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s
existential phenomenology in my forthcoming Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics
after Anti-Humanism. Co-Existence in an Interrogative Mode (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2007), ch.8.
3 Educational studies have also paid attention to nonverbal communication in the class
room. See for example the articles in Theory into Practice vol. 24.1 (Winter 1985).
4 Only a few decades ago, one might uncontentiously have advanced an equivalent
claim regarding the stylistic differences between working and middle class people in
Britain. The fact that this claim would now seem so suspect is testimony to the speed
with which such familiar markers can atrophy or shift.

Empire and Culture Now: Francophone Perspectives on Globalisation

Seventeen years after the publication of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (Said
1994) and as most disciplines in the humanities struggle to conceptualise the impact
on culture of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have characterised as the
centreless and unbounded contemporary ‘Empire’ of twenty-first-century capitalism
(Hardt & Negri 2001), how is francophone thought contributing both to the workings
of empire and to its critique?1 In diplomatic and geopolitical terms, France has often
positioned itself as the antagonist of the post-ColdWar global hegemony of the United
States.Within this frame, European culture is opposed to American empire, historical
perspective to short-term gain, universal values to market pressures, ethics to
Realpolitik. But such a view not only caricatures the actual diversity of US culture and
society, not to mention its often conflicted foreign policy aims, but also arguably serves
to conceal the post-imperial and postcolonial agenda of France itself. As a former
global superpower, France retains a considerable overseas presence in regions such as
the Caribbean and Polynesia, while seeking to maintain a wide sphere of influence
among formerly colonised nations. In this sense, France as a nation-state is both an
opponent and a proponent of empire, a critic of anglophone globalisation and a
promoter of its own global interests.
Furthermore, in cultural and ideological terms, the metropolitan French emphasis
on Republican unity and a discourse of universal rights masks a recurring inability
to recognise and accommodate cultural and religious difference at home and an
eagerness to gloss over the history of colonial exploitation abroad. This intertwining of
imperial and Republican projects has produced paradoxical results: the French Third
Republic was more imperialist than either the First or Second Empires in its vigorous
promotion of overseas expansion, while more recently, the controversial loi du 23
fe´vrier 2005, prior to its subsequent amendment, sought to ensure that the history
curriculum of the Republican education system gave due emphasis to ‘le roˆ le positif de
la pre´sence franc¸aise outre-mer’.2 Since the mid-twentieth century and the advent of
structuralism and poststructuralism, the homogeneity of Republican ideology has of
course been subjected to intense intellectual critique within France. As Franc¸ois Dosse
has shown, the deconstruction of the notion of a stable and consistent identity in
philosophy (Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and political theory (Althusser)
effectively split the concept of the Self by inserting it into a network of relations,
making it a function either of various others (by emphasising the relations) or of a
systemic Other (by emphasising the network itself) (Dosse 1992, pp. 252–265).
However, this theoretical privileging of alterity and difference has itself proved
ambiguous: in providing the means to criticise the Republican model of homogeneous
identity, it also validates the differences, and potentially the inequalities, that persist
beneath the universal values of the Republic.
A further paradox arises from the migration of French theory across the Atlantic. As
Franc¸ois Cusset has argued, the French critique of the Self and the Subject has in many
ways been very successfully appropriated by US identity politics, cultural studies and
postcolonial studies (Cusset 2005, pp. 143–178). Yet ironically this transfer of French
ideas into a context informed by a very un-French sensitivity to cultural diversity has
frequently been possible only at the price of a misunderstanding of the historical
specificity of the francophone cultures that generated those ideas in the first place.
Of course, as Edward Said has argued, the history of cultural exchange is full of
productive and creative misunderstandings that may reinvigorate as much as they
domesticate the ideas they import from elsewhere (Said 1984, 2002a). Nonetheless, the
American ‘diversification’ of French theory has in some cases produced a monolithic
representation of francophone cultures, meaning that anglophone postcolonial studies
has, in this respect at least, ironically repeated the colonial reflexes it sets out to
dismantle (see Mary Gallagher’s article in this volume).
The aim of this special issue is, then, to explore some of these paradoxes concerning
empire and its critique. At its centre is the question of the articulation of empire and
culture in francophone cultures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
an articulation that this introduction frames in terms of the models proposed by
Edward Said on the one hand and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the other. In
many respects, the key issue that emerges from this framing is that of exteriority, of the
possibility or impossibility of finding a place outside empire from which to criticise it.
As we shall see, while Said equivocates over the precise situation of culture in relation
to imperialism, Hardt and Negri effectively absorb culture into empire through their
insistence on the omnipresence of a global market and its absolute immanence
to contemporary life. In different ways, the contributions to this volume explore the
possible gradations between these two poles.
Both empire and culture are slippery terms whose meanings and connotations have
shifted over time and even today remain heavily context dependent. For its critics,
empire designates the system of exploitation of natural resources and human labour
of overseas territories developed primarily by the European nation-states from the
Renaissance through to the mid-twentieth century. For its apologists, such as those
responsible for the drafting of the loi du 23 fe´vrier 2005, empire represents rather the
paternalistic development of overseas territories and their populations in the interests
of economic progress. Notwithstanding their differences, both critics and apologists
view empire historically as a project of the nation-state. For Hardt and Negri, on the
other hand, contemporary Empire is a dynamic of capitalist development that has
exceeded and superseded the sovereignty of the nation-state that founded traditional
imperialism. If the meaning of empire is contested, so is that of culture. Raymond
Williams famously described culture as ‘one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language’ (Williams 1983, p. 87), and its relation to ideology,
politics and economics is particularly knotted, as the longstandingMarxist debate over
the relation of base to superstructure illustrates.While deterministic Marxisms such as
the versions of dialectical materialism developed in Soviet Russia have often insisted
that cultural life and production directly reflect economic structures, most Western
Marxisms from Gramsci to Althusser have argued rather for the relative autonomy of
culture (Althusser 1975; Hall 1977). In many ways, this debate has been inherited by
the cultural critique of imperialism, as Edward Said’s work demonstrates.
In Said’s Orientalism, Western culture often appears simply as the ideological
wing of the imperial project, a vast intellectual rationalisation of occupation and
exploitation in terms of a fictional mission civilisatrice (Said 1978; Parry 1992). In
other words, in Said’s early work, there is no real gap between empire and culture.
Furthermore, the Western representation of the Orient appears largely uncontested
in its discursive appropriation of overseas territory. Said’s later volume Culture and
Imperialism was partly inspired by the desire to correct the impression given by
Orientalism that imperialist ideology was not itself countered by indigenous discourses
and representations (Said 1994, p. xii). In Said’s exploration of these competing
discourses, then, a gap begins to open up between empire and cultural resistance to it.
To describe this gap, Said has frequent recourse to metaphors taken from the history of
Western music, and in particular to what becomes effectively the master metaphor not
just of Culture and Imperialism but of his late work as a whole, namely counterpoint.
In Western musical theory, counterpoint is the complex intertwining of two
melodic lines against a common harmonic background, a compositional technique
whose most celebrated exponent is J. S. Bach. For Said, however, counterpoint does
not refer to internal relations within the products of Western culture (that is, between
its imperial ideology and other elements that oppose or inflect it), but designates
rather the relationship betweenWestern culture and its colonial context, including the
non-Western counter-cultures that resist it (Said 1994, p. 59). These contrapuntal
relations between empire and resistance to empire imply a shared horizon of
intelligibility (the literal equivalent of the conventional harmonic system of Western
music). Yet Said’s use of counterpoint as a critical model is complicated by his recourse
to another musical term that he sometimes employs as an interchangeable alternative,
namely atonality (Said 1994, p. 386). The complication arises from the conflation of
what are effectively two different things. While counterpoint refers to melodic
variation and interference within a shared harmonic system, atonality designates
the outright abandonment of the Western harmonic system altogether, as in the work
of composers such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It is tempting here to cite Said’s
own paraphrase of what the musicologist Joseph Kerman said about Thomas Mann’s
use of musical theory in his novel Doktor Faustus, namely that ‘the book was based on
a false “master premise” (the antithesis between harmony and counterpoint)’ (Said
1992, p. 49).
Something more interesting is at work here, however, than simply a loose
transposition of terminology. The slippage in musical metaphors recurs across Said’s
later work, where counterpoint comes to designate not simply the relation between
culture and its colonial context but also the experience of exile (Said 2002b, p. 186),
and where the relation between counterpoint and atonality is further complicated by
the addition of a third term, dissonance (Said 2000, p. 295).What the slippage in Said’s
musical metaphors gestures towards is the problem of exteriority in relation to empire.
Counterpoint implies a shared harmonic structure, dissonance violates that shared
structure but implicitly recognises it even as it does so, while atonality moves beyond
it entirely. So, for Said, the critique of imperialism is alternately inside empire
(sharing its overarching structure), both inside and outside empire (clashing with its
overarching structure), and outside empire altogether (existing beyond its overarching
structure). In a sense, then, some of Said’s work suggests a conception of empire as a
system with no outside (the shared harmonic background to contrapuntal conflict),
and although his references to Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari tend to stress the
nomadising and deterritorialising thrust of their work, the very fact of their emergence
as a reference towards the end of Culture and Imperialism (Said 1994, p. 402) points
towards the totalising conceptual framework that informs Hardt and Negri’s project.
Hardt and Negri’s Empire presents itself as a kind of updated fusion of Marx’s
Capital and Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille plateaux (Hardt & Negri 2001, p. 415). As
distinct from earlier Left-wing theorisations of imperialism, this version of Empire is
not the conventional nation-state-based project of territorial expansion tied to
economic exploitation but rather a decentred transnational organisation of capital
that has abandoned traditional sovereignty for the exercise of power through a
multiplicity of interdependent networks. Empire is capital become immanent,
operating through alternating processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation as
it moves constantly across the world in search of the optimal conditions for the
extraction of value. In the process, it also creates the conditions of its own demise by
deracinating and radicalising an increasingly migrant global labour force with the
potential to form a resistant ‘multitude’ (Hardt & Negri 2001, pp. 393–413). Hardt
and Negri’s model of Empire has of course been much contested. Atilio Boron, for
example, has insisted on empirical and historical grounds that the supposedly obsolete
forms of nation-state-based imperialism actually continue to operate with great
effectiveness, albeit within a changed global context (Boron 2005, pp. 6–22). In more
theoretical terms, Ernesto Laclau has argued that the conceptual framework of the
book, with its vision of a totalising capital that produces its own antagonists for its
own ends and so seems to question the possibility of outside agency, actually
undermines its progressive political programme, which in quite traditional Marxist
terms presupposes the revolutionary agency of the oppressed (Laclau 2004, p. 29).
Independently of the overall strengths and weaknesses of the book’s argument,
however, what concerns us here is primarily the way it deals with the relationship
between Empire and culture.
Hardt and Negri’s preoccupations are overwhelmingly economic and political and
they devote little space to culture in its relations to their new conception of Empire.
Given the immanence of Empire, culture is simply absorbed into its processes of global
value extraction. There is a sense, however, in which culture occupies much more than
a marginal space in Hardt and Negri’s model. For Hardt and Negri, the global
dominance of Empire in the late twentieth century has wrought a transformation in
the dominant form of labour, the classical source of all value in Marxist thought.
‘Immaterial labor’, involving the ‘manipulation of symbols and information’, has come
to replace manual labour as the primary source of the generation of profit (Hardt &
Negri 2001, pp. 290–291). Although Hardt and Negri cite information technology and
the computerisation of work as the template for this new form of labour, the
underlying model for the ‘manipulation of symbols and information’ is, of course,
culture, as Michael Hardt has made clear in a subsequent interview: ‘In immaterial
labor, the economic and the cultural are inseparable’ (Hardt & Dumm 2004, p. 171).
In these terms, the study of culture offers a privileged path towards understanding the
workings of Empire.
In their different ways, then, Said and Hardt and Negri emphasise the importance
of culture to imperialism as they understand it. For Said, culture is caught up in a
complex interplay of relations of interiority and exteriority with empire, where
cultural forms possess the potential both to serve imperialism from the inside and to
challenge it from the outside. For Hardt and Negri, culture is entirely absorbed within
Empire, but as such has the potential to resist it from within. The articles collected in
this special issue seek to contribute to this mapping of culture in relation to empire
through the examination of specific works or cultural practices in relation to their
postcolonial context. In the course of this exploration of the relations between empire
and culture, several common emphases emerge. Four themes recur with particular
frequency: the question of specificity (of both form and context), the tensions between
anglophone and francophone cultures and perspectives, the relations between history
and memory, and the development of a transcolonial perspective.
It is significant that three articles hinge on interpretations of specific literary or
cinematic works: Mireille Rosello’s reading of Boualem Sansal’s novel Le Village de
l’Allemand (Sansal 2008); Bill Marshall’s study of a number of literary and cinematic
narratives that incorporate the practice of parkour; and Charles Forsdick’s analysis of
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novellas by Didier Daeninckx. This emphasis on the way in which francophone culture
represents a distinctive approach to empire and culture precisely by privileging the
specificity of form continues in Dominique Combe’s analysis of the ‘litte´raturemonde’
polemic and in Mary Gallagher’s argument concerning the preponderant
place of poetics in the francophone engagement with the relation between empire and
culture. This general emphasis on aesthetics confirms more generally Bill Marshall’s
conclusion that parkour cannot be interpreted in a global or absolute way, but needs to
be grasped in relation to its context and specificity as a cultural practice. In other
words, the questions of mediation (the form or medium in which approaches to
empire or globalisation are embedded) and situation (the specific context of a specific
formal practice) lie at the heart of most contributions to this project.
The articles by Dominique Combe, Mary Gallagher and Douglas Smith explore
another rich force field, namely that generated by the tension between ‘anglophone’
and ‘francophone’ approaches to the articulation of empire, culture and globalisation.
In more local and implicit ways, the relation between the approaches to empire and to
culture that are identified with the two languages also underwrites the differential
references to the banlieue in Bill Marshall’s article and the general postcolonialist
recalcitrance that distinguishes the francophone approach to colonial memory
analysed in Charles Forsdick’s article. A particularly sustained examination of the
relation between francophone and anglophone perspectives emerges in Dominique
Combe’s study of the manifesto ‘Pour une litte´rature-monde’, whose articulation of
(cultural) imperial desire is revealed as strikingly anachronistic; French culture is felt
to be behind the times and seeks to exploit the resources of its former empire in order
to catch up with an anglophone neighbour whose cultural models appear universally
applicable. As Combe demonstrates, contemporary British culture is presented in the
manifesto as being more ‘advanced’ than its French counterpart due to the dominant
position enjoyed by anglophone writers from the former British empire, a perceived
situation onto which a metropolitan French desire for cultural reinvigoration from its
former colonies is enviously projected. Ironically, however, it is the manifesto itself
that is extraordinarily anachronistic in its Eurocentric inability to ‘think global’.
Obsessed with ‘things British’ and in particular with the British centre–periphery
relation, it entirely ignores the contemporary dynamic and reach of anglophone
culture which is, if not actually global, then at least multivectoral and transcontinental.
Persistent anachronistic mobilisation of the notion or term ‘francophone’ in its nonreconstructed
imperial sense (of centre–periphery relations) is, as Dominique
Combe’s study shows, another symptom of the same postcolonial anachronism. A
related anachronism may be imputed, as Mary Gallagher suggests, to the reluctance of
the contemporary French cultural establishment to absorb and emulate the
contemporary anglophone academy’s approaches to empire and culture (via the
disciplines of postcolonial studies and cultural studies most notably). Yet, as Gallagher
also suggests, any assumption that the contemporary reach of transnational and
transcontinental anglophone culture automatically favours ‘non-imperial’, unimpeded
and ethical cultural flow is open to question.
Since the playing out of memory and re-readings of the past are an essential part of
contemporary debates around empire and culture, it is fitting in a collection focused
on these questions ‘now’ that several contributions engage with the recent past, either
in the form of historical materials or of materials that deal principally with historical
issues and events. Thus, two articles are firmly centred on questions of memory, while
a third re-evaluates the links between culture and geopolitics at a crucial point in
France’s transformation from an imperial to a post-imperial power. There are several
striking echoes between the articles by Charles Forsdick, Mireille Rosello and Douglas
Smith. Both Charles Forsdick and Mireille Rosello dwell on the question of the
interaction of different memories. For the former, this interaction concerns the
postcolonial relation of two types of memory: that of the former imperial nucleus and
of its multiple colonial territories. Forsdick’s argument emphasises the need for the
ideological decolonisation of the metropolitan territory itself and the reconfiguration
of Republican universalism to allow for multiple and hybrid identities. Similar issues
are explored by Douglas Smith in relation to the intertwined histories of French
cultural and nuclear policy and how they register the pressures exerted on
metropolitan culture by decolonisation. On another level, the articles by Smith and
Forsdick foreground the over-determination of meaning in aesthetic form: in Smith’s
case, the multiple and conflicting ways in which one building invokes and seeks to
contain a geopolitical crisis; in Forsdick’s, the impacted layering of memories in the
postcolonial context as they are represented and articulated in literary texts and sites
of colonial memory. Forsdick’s article in particular underlines the importance of
memory as a process of framing, shaping, and reading the contemporary stresses of
postcolonial relations.
Mireille Rosello’s analysis of memory also highlights the question of multiple
memories and their complex interrelation or coordination, but in such a way as to
open up a transcolonial dimension that problematises a simplistic model of
coloniser/colonised relations. In Rosello’s study of Boualem Sansal’s Le Village de
l’Allemand the bilateral dimension of the colonial or postcolonial relation (namely the
binary couple of coloniser/colonised) is complicated through the exploration of
transcolonial memories. Such memories involve parallel or criss-crossing relations
between different types of colonisers and colonised, implicating a subject who is
colonised in one relation but who occupies the position of coloniser in a different
relation, as well as adumbrating transcultural relations that might not be legitimately
constructed as ‘colonial’ at all in a conventional historical sense. It is perhaps
significant that of the two situations of extreme political violence that figure in Sansal’s
novel as problematic examples of ‘criss-crossing’, one, the National Socialist genocide
of the European Jews, is also shown to be inscribed in another transcolonial
parallelism in one of the works analysed by Bill Marshall.
In their exploration of issues surrounding formal and contextual specificity, the
anglophone/francophone axis, the relations between history and memory, and the
opening up of a transcolonial dimension, then, all the contributions to this special issue
engage in different ways with the question of interiority and exteriority invoked earlier
in this introduction: is culture inside or outside of empire? All in different ways would
refuse such a simplistic binary formulation; culture exists neither as a pure utopian
outside to empire nor as a completely recuperated instrument of imperialism. This
volume examines rather the marginal and borderline relations between culture and
empire and the multiple possibilities for critique and compromise that flow from it.
In certain respects, this ambiguous position transposes into spatial terms an ongoing
debate about the temporality of empire within postcolonial studies, namely the status
of the prefix ‘post’. For the impossibility of envisaging culture fully outside empire
mirrors the difficulty of conceiving the present as a time fully after (or ‘post’)
colonialism. Perhaps the main point of thinking and writing about ‘empire and culture
now’, then, is to insist not only that the complex borders between empire and culture
require further investigation but also that the past of imperialism has not been
liquidated in the supposedly new era of globalisation.